Bees, Hives, Swarms, and Everything under the Sun

Sex in the Backyard with a Pretty Yellow Blossom

Who ever said plant biology was boring? Certainly not me after shooting this video.

When I shot this video I didn’t realize I was witnessing an intimate relationship between flower and bee. The pistil is still showing here, but in the video, the petals clamp shut soon after the bee moves on.

The flower provides the nectar to attract the bee. The bee lands on the flower, pulling the petals apart to reveal the pistil. The flower makes pollen available which the bee carries away.

Since this is my 100th blog, I wanted to do something special. I wanted to have some music in the background. Sweet Thunder, a quartet in Portland, graciously gave me permission to use one of their tunes called, “Blues in the Barn.” Kiera O’Hara, who composed the music, said “she wrote it when she lived on a tree farm in Michigan and her piano room was a refurbished nook in an old barn.” “We are a collaborative bunch, so the sound of my tunes on the disk is very much the result of that collaboration.”

Thank you Sweet Thunder for the sweet music.

The video shows the bee and flower cooperation. I never took biology in school, so I don’t know if they show this racy stuff, but this is an unrated Bee movie in the truest sense.

I was unsure what this blossom was. I thought it might be a yellow vetch, so I asked Morris Ostrofsky. Morris, a forty year beekeeper and scientist affiliated with the Oregon State Master Beekeeping Program positively identified this blossom as a Bird’s Foot Trefoil.
“The plant is indeed Birds Foot Trefoil. This plant ranks high on the bees’ favorite forage list. If you go back in some of the older bee publications, it was actually encouraged as bee forage. However, it’s no longer encouraged because it has been found to be invasive. However, the bees’ still love it.”